Ignore mismatched tag in xml.etree.ElementTree.XMLParser Python

elementtree, python, python-2.7, python-3.x, xml-parsing

Solution

If there are mismatched tags, then the input that you are processing is not XML by definition (since it is not well-formed). There is no way to "ignore" mismatched tags with ElementTree.

The `XMLParser` class in the lxml library has a `recover` constructor argument (see http://lxml.de/api/lxml.etree.XMLParser-class.html). When `recover=True`, lxml will try to fix ill-formed input. Example:

from lxml import etree

BADINPUT = """
<root> 
  <foo>ABC</bar> 
  <baz>DEF</baz> 
</root>"""

parser = etree.XMLParser(recover=True)
root = etree.fromstring(BADINPUT, parser)
print etree.tostring(root)

Output (the bad `</bar>` end tag has been changed to `</foo>`):

<root> 
  <foo>ABC</foo>
  <baz>DEF</baz> 
</root>

Problem

Original source